Writing this at 3am so lmk if I'm being incomprehensible. Try for one second to apply that to real life. If we go down the rabbit hole of "what's one life to save millions?", or "what's the thousands of lives in Novokribirsk to save millions?" then we might end up defending indefensible moral actions. When trying to explain his actions, don't think "he did this to save the Grisha", think "he did this to obtain more power". A man in a position of power that abuses every person in his path.
He is a man in a position of power willing to do anything to keep it. It is heavily implied that even though his intentions are to make Grisha safe, he believes the only way for that to be possible is under his rule.
You can say he is sacrificing her life and agency to save millions of Grisha lives, but how does that work, really? And is it worth it? This is Alina's story so he's most characterized by what he does to her: manipulate and abuse her. You can interpret him as a metaphor for many things. The Darkling is very obviously framed as a villain. that definitely affects my opinions.Īnyway, I love the time that you took to write this up, you have some great and nuanced thoughts here! I also have a pretty big separation between characters I love in fiction and people I would actually like to hang out with IRL, so. If I analyze The Darkling simply as a literary character, I end up in the "Well, he has a point", camp, which is obviously the morally inferior camp if we're analyzing by IRL morals. I tend to lean more towards this interpretation due to reading "The Demon in the Wood", which was clearly crafted by an author who loved The Darkling's character enough to give him more depth, nuance and backstory. In the end, we can remember that this universe we all love was crafted by another person, who may have had some initially clear intentions for a character that became harder to implement as the story progressed. Trying to apply real-life moral rules to a fictional world where people can be magically coerced, brought back from the dead, etc (which changes the degree of gravity we give certain crimes). Trying to analyze his character when some of his actions are inconsistent and somewhat seem like they're inserted into the story as necessary plot devices The difficultly comes from several areas: The Darkling is a pretty confusing character, and I go back and forth between it being "he was well-written" and "he was accidentally made too sympathetic so there are some attempts at course-correction". I think the best antagonists are those where we can see their path towards how they became the figure we meet in their stories, and where we can see how they believe they're the true "heroes" of the story.
0 kommentar(er)
